S14E01

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. Today we're leaping into the world of Assassin's Creed 2, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed Revelations. Set during the height of the Italian Renaissance, these games follow the epic adventures of Ezio Aditorre. Such a grand story requires a grand villain or villains and perhaps no family in history is more synonymous with greed and treachery than the Borgias. You've probably heard of them, but how much do you know from fiction and how much from fact? You can't quite believe that you're here. The Vatican, the centre of the Catholic Church, the home of the Faith and the real seat of power in Europe. As you walk through the vast St Peter's Square and admire the splendor of St Peter's Basilica, you wish you could stop to admire the magnificence of it all. To stop and pray in deep contemplation. To reflect on all you've done and will do and ask the almighty for help or forgiveness. It is, after all, your first time here. But there is a stone in your heart that prevents you playing the pilgrim or even the tourist. You have a fixed purpose here. A path lies ahead of you from which you cannot veer. Any delay, however pious, will cost you dearly. You have an audience with the Pope. Alexander VI he calls himself. You know him by another name. A name that is a byword for vice. Borgia. Long may that name live in infamy. Perhaps you could be more forgiving if only one person carrying the name had done you wrong. But like a cancer, an evil has spread through the entire family. It takes many forms. Theft, bribery, murder. But it is undeniably there. Evil is so widespread through the House of Borgia you might think the family has been cursed. Instead, you have to wonder if they are a curse. Upon Europe. Upon Rome. Upon you. Inside the Basilica you ignore the amazing sights that surround you. Like a circling eagle you remain focused on your purpose. On your prey. It's not too late to turn back. You don't have to go through with this. He is the Pope after all. Surely he achieved such a rank for good reason. He can't be all bad. But that's just it, isn't it? He pretends that high rank comes with high morals. In the case of the Borgias, the exact opposite seems to be true. You hear the bustle of an approaching entourage. Here he comes. With his aides and his guards. You must hide and watch and wait for the right moment. From your hiding place you glimpse him amongst his cronies hunched, sluggish and adorned in gold and white robes. His engorged figure dominates the fawning gaggle around him. He rasps orders to his minions with a lazy drawl. Yet with each dismissive wave of his hand, you recall how swiftly he can move when he wishes to strike. Evil hides in the most unassuming forms. He barks an order for his retinue to disperse. As they scurry away, you know that this is your chance. It's time to act. We wish you had time to pause and pray he is beyond forgiveness. Hopefully you won't be. To help me understand the legacy of one of the world's most powerful families, I'm joined by Associate Professor Jennifer De Silva from the University of Toronto. Jennifer's book The Borgia Family, Rumour and Reputation is out now so you can grab a copy wherever you get your books. Welcome to Echoes of History, Jennifer. It's fantastic to have you with us. Hello Matt, it's lovely to be here. I'm very much looking forward to learning a bit more about this family that I know the name of but I don't know very much about and I think maybe lots of people will be in the same position. Well, they're a lot of fun to hear about, to play with in video games and generally to watch on the screen so I'm excited to talk to you. I wondered if we could start off by setting a little bit of context about the political landscape of Italy in the 15th century. So we've got the Roman Empire is gone. We've got the modern state of Italy as we know it today. Where are we in the 15th century? So you have to remember that the modern state of Italy as we know it didn't begin to come together until 1861 and then we don't have a capital city of the Kingdom of Italy being Rome until 1870. So in the 15th and into the 16th centuries, we have a collection of more than a dozen different small states on the whole in the Italian Peninsula. So you're going to recognize some names like the Republic of Venice or the Republic of Florence which becomes the the Duchy of Tuscany or the Republic of Genoa. And then there are smaller states like the Marcus 8 of Mantova, the Duchy of Ferrara, the Kingdom of Naples. All of these states are living cheek by jowl and to a great degree their rivals for political power, for land, for offices in the church. It's a really exciting time but it is also a time of great rivalry and lots of rising and falling. Yeah, so we shouldn't be thinking about a single country of Italy. We're really talking about a collection of city-states here that as you say were probably more rivals than they were allies. Absolutely. And this really allows space for families who are thinking about not just their community or their state, their kingdom or their republic, but also within that larger community how their family can gain prestige, wealth, land, titles. And this is sort of the landscape that the Borgia and many of the other families whose names we recognize like the Medici or the Sforza where they come into play through the 14 and the 1500s. And so the Borgias, as I said, it's a fairly famous name. People I'm pretty sure will have heard that name. What is their family background? Where are they from? Where are they powerful in the area that we call Italy today? So they came from Spain, but really their power flows through the Catholic Church. So the first time that the Borgia family appears on the high-level historical landscape, if we can call it that, is when Alfonso de Borgia is brought to Rome as a cardinal in 1444. His family is Spanish. He's a law professor actually and becomes a bishop. He is very close with the king of Valencia and the crown of Aragon. And he actually tutors one of his illegitimate sons who becomes then the king of Naples much later in the century. So when Alfonso comes to Rome, it is as a cardinal, which is an appointment for life, which means then he has an opportunity to bring more family members to Rome to support him, but also then to find ways to support them in their careers. And so it is from Spain through Rome and the papal court and the Catholic Church that we start to hear more about the Borgia family. I think that's fascinating that they're a family that we think of as almost quintessentially Italian. We associate them almost entirely with Italy, but they're actually fairly recently moving from Spain. They don't have sort of long roots in Italy at all. No. So the family certainly grows in Italy, specifically through Rome. But if you think about it in terms of generations, that first generation Alfonso's siblings are all born in Spain, in Valencia. And to some degree, there's a sense that they need to preserve their roots there. So Alfonso's nieces and nephews, there's a hope that well, perhaps we can find a way to bring them back to Spain to establish the Duchy of Gandia, which is the title that the Crown of Aragon gives to one of the eldest nephews of Alfonso. But also there's a hope that if we're going to be in Italy for decades, and of course, a cardinalate is a lifetime appointment, as I said, then we should start putting down roots there in the hope that perhaps another nephew might become a cardinal or we might be able to find land in the kingdom of Naples, which is sort of a subset or a secondary line of the family that rules Aragon as well. So everything is connected, but there are also kind of two fronts for success for the family. And it's the second generation. So Alfonso's nephews, particularly Rodrigo Borgia, who have great success in the Italian Peninsula. And it's Rodrigo's children who we definitely think of as being more Italian than Spanish. But the Spanish sort of black legend bleeds, as we could say, into the Italianness as well. And is there a single particular turning point that sort of propels them to the forefront of politics or is it a more gradual process? So there are moments on the road and certainly the elevation of Alexander to the cardinalate is important. But it's the next step in his career. When he's elected pope, this is Callixtus III in 1455, that really changes life for his nephews. And he had brought three nephews with him to Rome in the 1440s. Two of them go off to law school in Bologna, which was the first university. And those two come back and they are appointed cardinals by their uncle, who is now Callixtus III. So those two men, Luis and Rodrigo, have very long careers. They live into the early 1500s. Rodrigo dies in 1503 and his cousin in 1510. And so they have decades in which to establish themselves as cardinals, network within Italy, as well as in Spain. And those four life positions then allow them to support their family further. And it means really that the Borgia family is now established in Italy, looking back for the next half century. Yeah. And you mentioned it's the third generation that will become really closely connected to Italian politics. Are there any prominent members of that generation that we should know about? Absolutely. So Rodrigo Borgia is elected pope much as his uncle had been, although several decades later. So he becomes pope in 1492. And it's his children that we know best through a wide variety of media. And I'm sure that many of them are household names. Let's say he has seven children, shall we? There might be a couple more, but we definitely know about seven. We're probably only going to talk about the three most famous ones today. But it's those three, two sons, one sometimes called Giovanni and Cesare, the boys, and then his daughter, Lucrezia, who leave long trails in both history and popular culture. And it's really those three and their father. And sometimes their mother, Vanoza, who was mistress or concubine to their father, Rodrigo, that we hear most about. Is their rise the result of as much pure nepotism as it sounds like it is to me now? Do they show ability? Are they doing something? Or is this really just a case of one of them gets a good position in the church that sets the family up? So we have to think about nepotism in pragmatic terms. If we have someone who is absolutely appalling at their job, they're really not going to last long. No matter how important their parent or relative is, eventually they'll be to some degree sidelined in positions that are quite important. And so we could, looking back at the three children's careers, we can say that two out of three of them were definitely good at their jobs. The third one, perhaps less so. One of the sons, Juan, was not a good soldier. And he was the son who was earmarked for going into a secular career. He was meant to be a soldier. He became captain general of the church. He was much more interested in parties, in hanging out with friends, in prostitutes, all of the things that you might imagine a young man in that time period with money and prestige doing. His brother Cesare, who was made a cardinal, is much more concerned, as his father was, with administration, with politics, with ensuring that the Catholic Church, which he is a cardinal and his father is pope, are responsible for, ensuring that the church is smooth, that it is protected and strong. Their sister, Lucrezia, I shouldn't say to everyone's surprise, but to a little bit of surprise, turns out to be an excellent administrator. The governorship of a city called Spoleto in the Italian peninsula is entrusted to her for a brief period of time, and she does a good job. She marries into the Duchy of Ferrara, where she becomes an entrepreneur, actually. She is regent of the Duchy as well, and she's called by all ambassadors who meet her as someone who is able to not just charm and be attractive, but actually understand the political scene, business, and all the things that someone who is a noble person of great resources needs to do. So two out of three aren't bad. That's pretty good odds. They sound like a generally fairly competent bunch, just doing good jobs in high offices, but in pop culture we associate the name Borgia, I think, with baddies, with bad guys. Assassin's Creed 2 will have the Borgia Pope as the big baddie. He's the grandmaster of the Templars, and he manipulates the church to try and gain control over the whole of Europe. Is there something that means the Borgias deserve this association with bad behaviour and wickedness, or have they simply got a reputation they don't deserve? So this is tricky, because we're talking about a time period in which people at the top level of power and wealth were doing things that were very different from what we expect today. And so we have to keep that in mind. So the Catholic Church, to begin with, was in a much different position in Western Europe, in the late Middle Ages, in the early modern period, the Renaissance, and we're thinking about the period before the Reformation as well, so before 1519. Quite often the men who became Cardinals or Popes, they were very well educated, they were well connected to other nobles and princes, but they did not necessarily have a vocation to be a celibate cleric. But their family connections, their education, their administrative skills meant that they were the men who were in the position to do this work. So through the 15th century, we see other men like Rodrigo who have children who were conceived while they were Cardinals or earlier in life coming to great power. And from the modern perspective, a Pope that has children that he acknowledges is quite shocking. He's not married, but he was definitely having sex as a Cardinal. And that seems like quite a dissonance to us today. Rodrigo, who becomes Pope Alexander VI, is also in a very difficult position. He becomes Pope at a time when the Italian peninsula is transitioning back to a period of war. And so in addition to being very open about the fact that he has children trying to establish good marriages for his daughter and his son, and placing his other son Cesare, who is an excellent administrator and really general in his own right, in the best capacity to help the Church, all of these things make him seem like less of a good shepherd and more of a good prince. And I should say the Catholic Church is very much in that interesting situation where it owns land in Italy. The Papal States with Rome as the capital are the territory that is led by the Pope. So he is both prince and priest of the Papal States. And it's difficult for us today to think about. Yeah, the more worldly side of what the Pope has to do. That's right. And that's very different from what we expect today. And that intensifies. Perhaps the distance between us and the Borgia gives us room then to think all sorts of creative thoughts about them. Yeah, because it feels a bit like we're laying into them for doing things that were perfectly normal at the time. A bit of nepotism was all over the place. Having religious duties as well as temporal duties was entirely normal. You think about the Archbishop of Canterbury in England, huge landowner. We seem to almost label the Borgia for doing the things that everybody else was doing. So yes, absolutely. The nepotism was extremely common. In fact, it was seen as a virtue to some degree. Your success should help the people who depend upon you. It should help your family. There were a number of unusual things though during Alexander the sixth pontificate. And this has intensified perhaps the baddie reputation. Let's put it like that. So I mentioned that the Italian peninsula is turning towards a war footing in the 1490s when Alexander comes to the pontifical throne. The Italian wars begin in 1494. The King of France, Charles VIII, crosses the Alps and invades. He's seeking to take the Duchy of Milan as well as the Kingdom of Naples. He is drawing on a really old family connection that he thinks, well, this is the time to assert my claim. And it throws the entire peninsula into disarray. Alexander and his son Cesare are seeking to protect Rome. They want most of all to avoid it being sacked. And so they have to negotiate. They have to protect the city and really play politics as men who from our modern perspective should be priests. They should be praying. But this is a time when politics are extremely important. Now in the same period, Florence, which is not under Roman control but is Catholic, is undergoing a change as well. And this has an important impact on how we see the Borgia family. In 1490, a Dominican monk named Girolamo Savonarola had been invited to preach in Florence. He stays through most of the 1490s. He starts out as being an ally of the Medici family who were sort of the most powerful family, shall we say, in the city. But they're not yet Dukes. And Savonarola preaches publicly about the need to reform society and particularly the elite church. So he's looking at the Cardinals and the Pope, and he's wondering why the Pope has children, why Cardinals are nepotistic appointments. And Savonarola is very keen to have the King of France come in and sweep away all of this corruption. The problem, of course, is that he doesn't get on with Alexander, perhaps not surprisingly, since he's being so critical. Savonarola makes a lot of prophecies. He talks about a new series coming to clean out the Italian Peninsula. And of course, this is the King of France when he actually does appear. People are quite worried because it's a very violent invasion. And ultimately, Girolamo Savonarola is excommunicated for heresy and sedition, and he's burned in the city of Florence. So that moment of potential reform, which does not happen, is kind of a lost opportunity for Alexander, who's juggling the invasion by the French and this criticising monk. But it does leave a space for later reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin and Desiderius Erasmus. So there are a lot of things happening in the 1490s that Alexander has to deal with. Yeah, and it sounds like his involvement in both the development of the Church and to some extent, I guess, the distraction caused by the political and military problems in Rome almost lay the foundations and set the scene for the Reformation that will come because he's bathed away this early effort to slightly tweak things and change things. Maybe because he's thinking, I've got too much going on to be dealing with all of this right now. But in not dealing with that, you know, in having these these two heads on, he's almost not doing either properly. Yes. As I said, there's a lot going on. Alexander has a desire to protect the Church. There had been, I don't want to call it a wayward council, but perhaps a council that got away from the Pope earlier in the century and from the the 1450s onward, there's an effort made by each Pope not to open a general council of the Church that might seek to change the power dynamic between the Pope and the College of Cardinals and everybody else in the Church. There's a sense that the Church should be ruled as not quite a monarchy, but on that single person power, much like Jesus overseeing the Church, that the Pope is the representative of Jesus and the Holy Spirit on Earth. And so it should be one person rather than a more corporate or collective model. There is a moment, though, when Alexander does come very close to to opening up a campaign of reform. In 1497, we're told his favorite son, Juan, mysteriously dies. It's pretty clear he's been murdered. He leaves his mother's house with his brother, Cesare, late at night in Rome, and he says he's going off to have some fun with a masked man. And he shows up two days later in the Tiber River with stabbed wounds, and his throat has been partly slit. And Alexander is devastated. This is his son who disappeared, and he truly, truly loves his children. That's one of the things that is really attractive about Alexander. And so Juan's death forces him to think, well, is this in some way a message from God? Is this an opportunity for me to remake the world, to do a better job, to to focus on reform? But again, we're in the midst of all sorts of other things happening. Juan had been the captain general of the church. He's very young. He's in his 20s. He wasn't very good, actually, at being captain general of the church. And there are questions about how he died. And that moment of reform, which is a much, much bigger undertaking, is kind of lost in all the other things that are happening in the 1490s, which is too bad. Things might have been different. Yeah, it sounds like Alexander is juggling a lot. How did the Borges get on with each other? They're doing quite well. You know, they're getting promoted. There's the siblings, there's cousins around. Are they are they getting on quite well in the pursuit of furthering the family's fortunes? So I would say yes. And every now and again, no. So it it's an interesting sort of difficulty for the historian to extricate what we know about the siblings from what people said about the siblings. It can be difficult to extract rumor from act. And it seems generally that the siblings got on well. And we're thinking about just those three. So Juan, Cesare, Lucrezia, there is a younger son, Joffre, that we don't hear too much about, although there. So there are lots of rumors. I think this is what puts the extra layer on top. There are rumors about Joffre's wife, having an affair with with Juan. There are rumors about Cesare killing his brother, Juan, because he he wanted to be captain general of the church. There are rumors about Cesare killing Lucrezia's second husband. And it is hard to to separate those out from seeing the siblings together. There's not too much that would indicate tension in seeing those siblings together, other than siblings who are very close in age. But they all to some degree have their own tracks that are set by their father. They all have prestige, high offices, and lives laid out before them. But there's tension in this high level of work, of life, and moments of violence in all their lives that perhaps to us modern people suggest that perhaps we can only know so much about them. And the easiest thing is to fall back on rumor. And although that's a lot of fun, it doesn't necessarily get us too much closer to the truth. Yeah, so we've maybe read too many gossip mags about the bushes. But people at the time were doing the same thing. That's what makes it really difficult. I'll have to keep my voice down, because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack, or Julius Caesar, or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit. Because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience, what's and all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries, as well as probing into everyday issues, the nitty-gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out of here and avoid the bedpan. How were the family viewed by contemporaries? If we've got this impression of them generally as being sort of bad guys and villains, how did their contemporaries view them? So it comes and goes, let's put it like that. Generally contemporaries viewed Alexander, so Rodrigo Borgia, who becomes Alexander the sixth pope, as being extremely competent. He was vice chancellor of the Catholic Church from 1455 to his election in 1492. And vice chancellor is really, we would call him the number two, the highest administrator in the church. So he was understood to be someone who knew a lot about the church, who was able for decades to ensure that it ran smoothly. And we're thinking about policy, about tax collection, about ensuring that all the varying offices in the church at the highest level in Rome work together. And he kept this office over several pontificates. So if he wasn't good at it, he would have been removed by an incoming pope. Those administrative skills, as I said, were passed on to Cesare and Lucrezia. They are very young, but on the whole, aside from one not being a very good soldier, they're admired by contemporaries. The nepotism is grumbled about. The king and queen of Spain are not hugely impressed that the pope wants, is pushing them to find offices for his son in Spain. But when Lucrezia is of age to be married, there are a number of suitors and she's married three times over Alexander's 11 year pontificate. The first difficulty though comes with her first husband. His name is Giovanni Sforza. Lucrezia marries him when she is 13. They begin cohabiting a year later when she's 14. And he is a cadet branch of the family that runs the Dessi of Milan. They're only married for a few years and then Alexander's politics changes and Milan is no longer important. So he asks Giovanni if he would agree to an annulment of the marriage. And of course, if we think about the masculine honor model in Renaissance Rome, agreeing to an annulment of your marriage with your wife who you've lived with for three or more years, the only way to do this is to plead impotence. And there is no way that Giovanni Sforza, who is Lord Efezaro, wants to tell the world that he is impotent. He says no and he's very angry about this. The pope pushes because he wants to marry Lucrezia off to a son of the King of Naples. Eventually, Giovanni is pressured by his uncles in Milan to agree to take the very expensive dowry that he had been given to keep that and to sign a statement that Lucrezia is still in fact a virgin, that he is impotent and just get on with life. So that happens and that's where we start to get rumors about incest in the Borgia family. And that's kind of the first moment when the rest of the world starts going a little bit beyond grumbling about nepotism and we get those rumors that have continued until the present day from an angry, angry ex-husband but nevertheless. I was going to say how much credit should we give those rumors? It sounds like not a lot. That's right. So it was a close-knit family and father and brother are very interested in Lucrezia's marriage prospects but then we see that in all the other families at this level in Italy and beyond in Europe that a woman's marriage prospects are key to her father and her brother and sometimes even her son if she's remarrying to their lives as well. Yeah and accusations like that are always a weapon to be wielded against big powerful families aren't they? I mean I think immediately of Eleanor of Aquitaine being accused of having affairs with her uncle Raymond in Tripoli, of having had an affair with Henry II's dad and all that sort of stuff. This idea of incestuous relationships is a way of sort of attacking powerful women in a way that's difficult to defend against as well. It is absolutely and we should say in Defence of Lucrezia that she would not have been accepted by the families that she married into for her second and third marriages if she had if these rumors had been believed. They might have been fun to repeat but people at the highest levels would not have accepted her in her third marriage as the new duchess of Ferrara if she had any sort of tainted sexual history and that is something that would have been a red line. She was considered to be an excellent duchess, she invested in a number of business projects but also local convents and she was believed to be very devout as well. Attacking a sister or a daughter's sexuality or chastity was also a way to attack the men who were supposed to protect her so this is really attacking Cesare and Alexander through through Lucrezia. And the Borges are also in the Italian peninsula at the point when the Renaissance is really beginning to flourish. How much of a role do they play? Are they big patrons of art as well? So Lucrezia certainly is. In Ferrara she was considered to be a tastemaker, she was very interested in music. The papal court in Rome has an interesting sort of combination of ecclesiastical, of spiritual and literary and historical interest sort of all rolled into one. Each of the Cardinals' households and there are more than two dozen in the 1490s have their own interests in patronage. We don't hear a lot about Cesare Borgia because he's so involved in politics and in military enterprises. Even after he ceases being a cardinal in 1498 and he seeks a wife in France, he's much more interested in politics and military matters. But if you look closely at Alexander's pontificate then you can see that certainly from the perspective of some of his processions he's very interested in antiquity, in stylizing himself as a new Alexander and we have to think about Alexander the Great here. But all of this of course is happening in Rome. There's support for expanding the city or I should say renovating the city for the Vatican Library, for Pinturicchio, frescoing the Borgia Apartments which you can visit now at the Vatican Museums. They're beautiful, lots of deep blue and historical allusions as well. Really a beautiful space. Perhaps because Alexander didn't involve Michelangelo in any way like some of his other successors, we tend not to think quite so much about the Borgia family being linked to more traditional humanism or artistic endeavors but it was all happening at the same time. You mentioned a couple of the other prominent families in the Italian Peninsula around this time, the Medici, this Forza. Where do the Borgia stand in terms of standing with those families? Are they on a par with those families and how do they get on with some of those other significant families? So undoubtedly the Forza and the Medici thought of themselves as above. This family that was lately come from Spain that had achieved prominence through the church. They did not begin as Italian noblemen or landowners and so the Forza who were rulers of the Duchy of Milan and the Medici who wanted to be and eventually became rulers of Florence certainly saw that they were different and probably in their minds a little bit above the Borgia. But there's great power, great wealth to be had in the Catholic Church in this period both from being pope and from appointing nephews or in-laws to the College of Cardinals. That's one of the reasons why Lucrezia Borgia is married off to Giovanni Forza as her first husband. Milan does want to keep Rome close but when that marriage ends it's really part of the Italian wars that begin in 1494 that I mentioned earlier and Milan does not fare well in this time period. So Charles VIII of France is looking to take control of Milan. One of his successors does. The Forza family loses Milan and it is actually a lesser member of the family although perhaps very well known, Caterina Forza who tangles with Cesare later on after he has left the church and when he is trying to become Duke of the Romagna he attacks and conquers most of the smaller states within the Italian Peninsula and she holds out in in Forli. She is the lady of Forli and Imola and interestingly after she is conquered, brought to Rome, imprisoned for some months and then released she ends up marrying a member of the Medici family and the Medici started out as you might know as bankers and they're part of the republican government in Florence. They're very keen on the Catholic Church particularly being bankers for the Pope and getting into the College of Cardinals. They end up having two Popes Leo X and Clement VII in the early 1500s but they see this as steps towards greater power in order to take over control of Florence. So the Medici might be the most successful but it is actually the it is Caterina Forza who gives birth to Giovanni della Bandonere who is one of the Medici who is the father of the second Medici duke in Tuscany. So it's quite extraordinary how those three families in particular all sort of come together and the church is very much an entry way of gaining power in in the Italian Peninsula and entrenching the landed power that is already there for other families. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack or Julius Caesar or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Patwix the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience, once and all if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries as well as probing into everyday issues, the nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Patwix the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out here and avoid the bedpan. And so it sounds like the Borges sort of emerge onto the scene in the mid-15th century. We know they will be dominant in politics in the region for the rest of the 15th century into the 16th century. How and when and I guess why does their power and influence begin to decline? So death comes for us all, right? And even Alexander the Sixth, although one of the rumors is that he had made a pact with the devil that he would become pope and rule for a very long time, even death comes to end that. And it's Alexander's death in 1503 that really brings an end to access to troops for his son, Cesare, who by this point has left the carnalate and he is captain general of the church and doing quite well. He and his father become sick at the same time. It's not clear if it's food poisoning or disease or poison, but something happens in 1503. Cesare recovers, Alexander does not, he dies, and a new pope is elected. This is Pius the Third, who's relatively supportive of Cesare, but he dies very quickly. And Amen Giuliano della Rovara, another big family in the Italian peninsula, who is not supportive at all of Cesare becomes pope. And so Cesare essentially has to release all of the territory that he had conquered back to the vicars who had previously owned those states in the Italian peninsula. He's briefly brought to Rome and he's told you need to leave now. So he flees to Navarre where his wife lives, Charlotte d'Albrecht, she is sister of the king of Navarre. And he spends the last four years of his life fighting in northern Spain and southern France, and he dies in 1507. So his other brother Juan Borgia dies in 1497. Alexander dies in 1503, Cesare in 1507. It really leaves Lucrezia, who lives until 1519 as the Duchess of Ferrara, who continues the family. But she too dies young, she's only 39. So this was a time period in which you made hay while the sun rose and you did as much as you could. Perhaps an epilogue to the family though is Saint Francisco Borgia, who perhaps we wouldn't expect at all. But he is the grandson of Juan, who grew up in Spain. Juan had a wife in Spain who had stayed there, not come to Rome, and raised their son. His son, after his own wife dies, joins the Order of the Jesuits in 1560, thereabouts. And he too is a great administrator, perhaps inherited from his grandmother or his great grandfather, who can say. And he's elected the Superior General of the Order of the Jesuits, and is eventually canonized in 16th century. It's quite extraordinary. But I would say that all good things come to an end, but we see sort of the family carrying on in some ways, sometimes with a different name, like the Estée family that Lucrezia married into, sometimes a Jesuit saint. It's quite amazing. That's incredible. They do seem like the star burned brightly and quickly, and then faded away. But as you say, it has a bit of a tail to it as well. Do you think the Borgias deserve the popular reputation that they have as a bunch of really bad guys? Do you like the Borgias? I love the Borgias actually. They're a lot of fun to talk about. And if nothing else, there's enough sort of gray unknown space in their history that it allows us to think about whether or not the things that they did that may or may not have been accepted then are acceptable now. How can we think about them as individuals, as highly fictionalized characters today? I like them for the conversation, for what we don't know about them. And they were pretty successful for a family that came from Spain and unexpectedly had two popes and several cardinals. They show us what the path to great power was like in the Renaissance, and that both men and women could achieve great things. So I do like them. I think they're really interesting. But they've only become a household name because they are cast as the baddies, which also makes them a lot of fun to talk about. Yeah, absolutely. And so Assassin's Creed games give players a chance to step into the animus machine to be transported back into history to relive some key moments. If I could put you into an animus and I could assure your physical safety, you are in no danger from your journey to the past. Is there a moment in Borgia history or is there a particular Borgia family member that you would like to witness or meet or talk to? Well, so my research beyond the Borgias focuses on the masters of ceremonies at the people court. So these were the guys who stood beside the Pope in the Sistine Chapel and said, time to stand up now during mass or sit down or speak louder, or who introduced ambassadors during consistory sessions and ensured that everything kind of went smoothly as we would expect a master of ceremonies to do today. I would like a day to wander around the Vatican Palace and see just how it actually rolled. So watch the Pope move from mass in the Sistine Chapel, dressed in the rich vestments with the the mitre with pearls on it into all of the frescoed rooms. Watch him sit down and go to work and do the paperwork and talk to an ambassador who was visiting and perhaps see him interact, see Alexander interact with his son. And watch just like the world unfold and do all of the regular things that today we don't think about. And then maybe if we could do everything on one day, it would be awesome to watch a really great procession. Maybe watch Alexander go from St. Peter's Basilica to the Lateran Cathedral, take possession of Rome in 15 or sorry in 1492 as the new Pope and see all of the pageantry and how chaotic it was and loud and noisy and long and just watch the cardinal sort of trail by. I just want to see a day and how all the mundane things happened but in a different way from today. Or perhaps it was exactly the same. Who can tell? Has anyone made to find out? There is the animation. We'll get back there. Playing more video games. I've been quite fascinated by Rodrigo. He's the Pope Alexander. He sounds like a fascinating figure who was almost like a CEO. He's juggling so many different departments of religion and politics and art and war and all of that kind of thing. And he seems like a really fascinating figure. So maybe I'd like to have had a chat with him and maybe seen which one he thought was the most important one of his roles, I guess. But it's been absolutely fascinating to learn a little bit more about the Borges, Jennifer. It's been incredible to share your expertise and to get under the skin of this family from Spain who made good in Italy. Thank you very much for joining us. It's been my pleasure. Thank you so much, Matt. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. In the next episode we'll turn from one of history's scariest families to one of the world's most inspiring buildings. The door to the door to the buildings. The Duomo of Florence. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts and if you're enjoying it you can leave us a review too. I'll see you next time among the Echoes of History.